Day 15: The Best Horror Film

Don't cross this kid. 

Day 15 of the 31 day film challenge: The best horror film.

I love a good horror film and one of the best is Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976). The American ambassador to Great Britain (the magnificent Gregory Peck) and his wife (Lee Remick) begin to suspect that their son, Damien, is not a normal little boy (clue: he has a birthmark shaped like the number 666 on his head). Soon people around the cute tyke start dying in a variety of ways (decapitated by a sheet of glass and impaled with a church pole are just a few choice examples). 

For me, The Omen has all the necessary elements that make a great horror film: strong leads, the inclusion of a prophecy and/or legend, creepy settings, haunting music, and a scary bad guy. In the case of The Omen, the bad guy is the Antichrist. You can’t get much scarier than that.

I’ve never found horror films where the characters are threatened by some crazy man with a machete or a supernatural like a vampire or zombie to be all that frightening. Somehow you can always manage to stop them—shoot the guy or stake the vampire, for example. But when the Devil comes to town, there’s only so much you can do. Which is one of the reasons why The Omen is so damn scary and is one of the best horror films ever made.

To find out more about the 31 Day Film Challenge, visit here.